Howard, twenty, regularly wore jeans without a shirt around the house. He liked to go bare-chested to show off his well-muscled, if not brawny frame. Now his chest was a reddish brown color, like an Indian’s, and ridged like a potato chip or an old-fashioned washboard. His face was calm, eyes closed, mouth shut. He was still breathing.
Kenneth—it had to be Kenneth—looked more like a pile of dough in clothes than her eldest brother.
Whatever had happened was completely incomprehensible. She wondered if it was something everybody else knew about, but had forgotten to tell her.
No, that didn’t make sense. People were seldom cruel to her, and her mother and brothers were never cruel. The best thing to do was back out the door and call the police, or somebody; somebody who would know what to do.
She looked at the list of numbers pinned above the old black phone in the foyer, then tried to dial the emergency number. She kept fumbling, her finger jerking from the holes in the dial. Tears were in her eyes when she finally managed to complete the three digits.
The phone rang for several minutes without answer. Finally a recording came on: “All our lines are busy. Please do not hang up or you will lose your priority.” Then more ringing. After another five minutes, she hung up, sobbing, and dialed for the operator. No answer there, either. Then she thought of the conversation they had had the night before, about some sort of bug in California. It had been on the radio. Everybody getting sick and troops being called in. Only then, remembering this, did Suzy McKenzie go out the front door and stand on the steps, screaming for help.
The street was deserted. Parked cars lined both sides—inexplicably, for parking was forbidden between eight in the morning and six at night every day but Thursday and Friday, and this was Tuesday, and the enforcement was strict. Nobody was driving. She couldn’t see anybody in a car or walking or sitting in a window. She ran up one side of the street, weeping and shouting first in supplication, then in anger, then terror, then again begging for help.
She stopped screaming when she saw a postman lying on the front walk of a brownstone between two parallel wrought-iron fences. He lay on his back, eyes shut, and he looked just like Mother and Howard. To Suzy, postmen were sacred beings, always reliable. She used her fingers to push the terror out of her face and scrunched her eyes shut in concentration. “That bug’s gotten everywhere,” she told herself. “Somebody has to know what to do.”
She returned to her house and picked up the phone again. She began dialing all the numbers she knew. Some went through; others created only silence or strange computer noises. None of the phones that rang were answered. She re-dialed the number of her boyfriend, Cary Smyslov, and listened to it ring eight, nine, ten times before hanging up. She paused, considered for a moment, and dialed the number of her aunt in Vermont.
The phone was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” The voice was weak and tremulous, but it was definitely her aunt.
“Aunt Dawn, this is Suzy in Brooklyn. I’m in big trouble here—”
“Suzy.” It seemed to take time for the name to sink in.
“Yes, you know, Suzy. Suzy McKenzie.”
“Honey, I’m not hearing too well now.” Aunt Dawn was thirty-one years old, no decrepit old woman, but she didn’t sound at all well.
“Mom’s sick, maybe she’s dead, I don’t know, and Kenneth and Howard, and nobody’s around, or everybody’s sick, I don’t know—”
“I’m kind of under the weather, myself,” Aunt Dawn said. “Got these bumps. Your uncle’s gone, or maybe he’s out in the garage. Anyway he hasn’t been in here for…” She paused. “Since last night. He went out talking to himself. Not back yet. Honey—”
“What is going on?” Suzy asked, her voice cracking.
“Honey, I don’t know, but I can’t talk anymore, I think I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Suzy.” And then, incredibly, she hung up. Suzy tried ringing again, but there was no answer and finally, on the third attempt, not even a ringing sound.
She was about to open the phone book and begin dialing at random, but she thought better of it and returned to the kitchen. She might be able to do something—keep them cool, or warm, or bring whatever medicine was in the house.
Her mother looked thinner. The ridges seemed to have collapsed on her face and arms. Suzy reached out to touch her mother’s face, hesitated, then forced herself. The skin was warm and dry, not feverish, normal enough except for its appearance. Her mother’s eyes opened.
“Oh, Mother,” Suzy sobbed. “What’s happening?”
“Well,” her mother said, tongue licking at her lips, “it’s quite beautiful, actually. You’re all right, aren’t you? Oh, Suzy.” And then she shut her eyes and said no more. Suzy turned to Howard sitting in the chair. She touched him on the arm and jumped back as the skin seemed to deflate. Only then did she notice the network of root-like tubes extending from the cuffs of his jeans, vanishing into the crevice between the floor and the wall.
More roots stretched from Kenneth’s paste-colored arms into the pantry. And behind her mother, reaching over her skirt and into the cabinet beneath the sink, was a single thick pipe of pale flesh. Suzy thought wildly for a moment of horror movies and makeup and maybe they were shooting a movie and hadn’t told her. She bent closer to peer behind her mother. She was no expert, but the pipe of flesh wasn’t makeup. She could see blood pulsing in it.
Suzy climbed slowly back up the stairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, braiding and unbraiding her long blond hair with her fingers, then lay back and stared at the very old silvery linoleum on the ceiling. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now,” she said. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now.”
And so on, into the afternoon, when thirst drove her to the bathroom for a drink. Around her gulps ‘of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her. She stood by the banister, still in her sky-blue robe, and began to make plans. She wasn’t sick—not yet—and she certainly wasn’t dead.
So there had to be something to do, someplace to go.
And still, in the back of her mind, she hoped that perhaps in the way she opened a door, or on some path she might follow through the streets, she could find her way back to the old world. She didn’t think it was likely, but anything was worth the chance.
There were some tough decisions to be made. What good was all her education and special training if she couldn’t think for herself and make tough decisions? She did not want to go into the kitchen any more than she had to, but food was in the kitchen. She could try entering other houses, or even the grocery store at the end of the block, but she suspected there would be other bodies there.
At least these bodies—alive or dead—were her relatives.
She entered the kitchen with her head held high. Gradually, as she went from cabinet to cabinet and then to the refrigerator, her eyes lowered. The bodies had collapsed even further; Kenneth seemed little more than a filament-covered white patch in wrinkled clothes. The fleshy roots into the pantry had gone straight for the plumbing, climbing up into the small sink and into the water tap, as well as down the drain. At any minute she expected something to reach out and grab her—or for Howard or her mother to turn into lurching zombies—and she gritted her teeth until her jaws ached, but none of them moved. They no longer looked like they could move.